1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to management of regulated industries. In particular, the present invention facilitates regulatory, tax compliance, inventory and e-warehouse management of regulated industries.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heavily regulated and process oriented industries such as Oil & Gas, Food (e.g., agriculture products, processed food, meat/poultry, etc.), Beverages (e.g., consumable liquids such as spirits, beer, juice, etc. . . . ), Chemicals, Consumer products (e.g., cosmetics and skin care), and Pharmaceutical Drugs {e.g., Chemical Development (also known as Drug Substance), Pharmaceutical Development (also known as Drug Product), Biopharmaceuticals (Drug Substance and Drug Product) as well as Generics} share a number of common characteristics. These kind of process industries are highly regulated by local, state, federal and international agencies such as, for example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Trade and Tax Bureau (TTB part of Treasury), to ensure that safe and efficacious products are consumed by the public and that each of the products presented by companies in these aforementioned industries are not fraudulent or harmful (e.g., that the product integrity is maintained for the life of the product). The product integrity is proven, in part, by comparing product records at one point in time against product history records of another point in time during the development, manufacturing and commercial sale of these products. This is challenging for these kinds of heavily regulated process industries because, by nature, they tend to produce products that are dynamically changing or very complex. Thus, the information associated with these product history records becomes more difficult to manage. For example, these industries may require highly variable raw materials such as proteins secreted from mammalian cells or grape juice secreted from agriculture vine-grapes.
Another major requirement for “heavily regulated industries” is the ability of a company to demonstrate that it's production processes from development through commercial manufacturing are fully traceable, meaning that a third party (such as an Agency e.g., FDA) could come in and demand to see product history form one point in time to another. For instance, a company must be able to prove that “what it is producing is indeed being produced, in the manner it claims to be being produced in.” These onsite inspections, audits, and information requests often focus on a particular process for a particular set of materials from one point in time to another. Failure to provide immutable proof of product history traceability has subjected companies to large fines, as well as shutdowns.
In addition for failure to provide proof of the process over time, these industries are usually subject to large fines or delays in production/shutdowns for non-compliance of any part of the submission application, audits, labels, waste, emissions, safety, etc. Payment of the appropriate taxes is an ongoing challenge as the payments are determined by the “amount produced” and “type” of product produced, all of which require extensive record keeping along many dimensions over time.
These industries are also “heavily process oriented” meaning that products are produced in a manner that consists of extensive combinations of steps such as complex blends, formulations and recipes. Another drawback is that, in some of these industries (e.g., the pharmaceutical and beverage industries), extensive record keeping is required to create the product history “paper trail.” Typically, the kind of record keeping required by these industries is a complete history of the product's lifecycle, often spanning from the raw materials to the final product and inclusive of all intermediate products across the supply chain. The type of information required in the record keeping of product history typically spans the following dimensions: personnel and their training requirements, process, materials, equipment, standards, and facility/environment information that collectively form the comprehensive information for the specified record.
These industries may also have complex order tracking for work personnel, equipment materials, processes (e.g., campaign planning and execution, work order generation, etc.). For instance, tracking the state of materials from raw material to intermediates, to final products etcetera or tracking the equipment history (calibration, cleaning, usage, etc.) requires a number of different kinds/pieces of information making it a complex process. Not only does the information in these areas have to be recorded and tracked, but it must be compared to standards set both internally within the company and externally by regulating authorities. Furthermore, it must be compared to itself at differing points in time (e.g., Commercial Manufacturing takes place in Year 9 and the equipment set up, calibration, cleaning and usage is recorded, tracked and compared against the equipment history in Year 8, which was submitted to regulating authorities and is what the company's license to commercially manufacture is based upon).
These types of regulated process industries are further challenged in that a number of different indirect/input goods are produced along the path of creating the final product and all of these indirect/input/intermediate goods have to be managed in a similar manner of recording information/tracking/comparing to different points in time as described above. Visibility is essential to achieving this comprehensive record keeping and management of information in these regulated process industries, yet at present these industries have low visibility at all levels of process input and product history across the supply chain.
As an example, compliance in the wine industry begins as soon as the grapes reach the winery. This means that wineries must track where the grapes were grown, how they were shipped to the winery and the tonnage used throughout production, bottling and aging. The manufacturing process can go on for many years. In addition, alcohol content during fermentation and the bottling/aging process must be tracked. Because a winery's ability to comply with the multitude of regulations hinges on capturing specific information throughout the continuous production process which is also tied to inventory, it is important that compliance be tied into the winery's supply chain management.
Wineries today also have limited visibility into their internal operations, with little real-time information of their wine in-process inventory levels. The wine making side of the industry often lacks the ability to report how many bottles of a certain type of wine are present in their cellar. They also find it difficult to match production levels with inventory needs, resulting in inefficient buying.
Wineries often enjoy preferred supplier relationships formed by verbal or consolidated purchasing among their subsidiaries resulting in varying pricing agreements. Therefore, wineries regard their ingredients, supplier lists, and their recipes as proprietary information requiring high levels of security. Also, wineries have limited technology staff, thus requiring greater external hands-on support.
Known computer-based products that focus on one particular need of the wine industry do not address the problems described above. Known systems lack total supply chain management solutions and do not provide complete regulation and tax compliance management. Furthermore, the current systems provide licensing on a per seat basis; and have limited ability to provide visibility into internal operations and in particular lack real time accessibility to all employees of the company.
As a result of the above problems in the wine industry, everything from inventory management, regulatory and tax compliance, and order fulfillment on the supply side is fragmented both inside and outside the enterprise and is labor intensive, inefficient, and expensive. Regulatory and tax compliance is manual, complex and time consuming. Suppliers and buyers lack visibility and parent companies have little real time information on the buying and spending categories of their subsidiaries. Also there is little coordination between supplier production and buyer demand. As a result of such problems, the cost of goods sold in the wine industry averages 50-80% of net revenues, and general and administrative costs are often as high as 10-35% of net revenues.
Currently, there are no broad web-based solutions that fully meet these kinds of complex needs such as comprehensive product history record keeping in process management of heavily regulated industries. In fact, many of the record keeping functions and filing processes for federal and state regulations still occur through outdated manual time-consuming means.